Retrospective

I’ve been gathering all of my diabetes related data for more than a year now: carbs, boluses, BG readings, CGM traces, exercise data, insulin changes, etc. Almost all of this data is automatically generated and captured through my pump/CGM, and I don’t have to do much of anything to aggregate it. Making use of it is another matter entirely.

Collecting all of this diabetes data is just hoarding unless I actually use it to make my diabetes better. And do I ever need to make improvements. For reasons that I’m trying to figure out, the last six months have not been kind to my BGs, and the last three have been even worse, giving me my highest A1c since I was diagnosed with diabetes almost 15 years ago. Tomorrow morning I will meet with my endocrinologist, and I know the question of “What changed?” is going to come up. In order to answer “What?” I’m first trying to answer the question “When?” How have my BG readings changed throughout the day compared to six months ago? Looking at that information, I can move on to the question of “What’s different at those times of day?”

Here are the statistics from six months to three months ago, and then from three months ago to yesterday (when I had my blood drawn).

There’s a lot of data there, but you can see that I’m lower overnight and slightly unchanged during the first half of the day, but then the rest of the day is up, with the afternoon and evening readings quite a bit higher. All of this combined to raise my overall BG average by about 20-25 mg/dL (1-1.4 mmol/L). The variability is more or less unchanged, so if we subtract the mean and median values from these sets of data, we can see the changes more clearly.

And that is pretty much what I know. Tomorrow the trial-and-error phase of figuring out what to change begins, but at least we can start from the data.

Pigeonholed…

Medical disclaimer…

I am not a doctor and do not have any medical training. Your diabetes may vary. You should always check with your health care team before making any changes to your diabetes self-management or exercise regimen.